Didn’t you hear? Christian is a lying, scheming, impossible to work with, dev who they just couldn’t possibly work out a deal with.

It would’ve made the users happy, but ultimately Apollo is not profitable for Reddit. It would need to be retooled and redesigned to extract data and push advertisers. as a free version…

Of course, Reddit could sell it as a “$2/mo Premium Reddit Experience” app that keeps what it is. And I’m sure there’s a ton of folks that’ll pay the benefit of that, particularly mods and power users.

Apollo’s paid subscriber base is 50K. Assuming they maintain that, it’s $1.2M/year revenue. The question is… is that worth it to a billion dollar company? To maintain and support all that?

My gut would say ‘yes’. Although goodwill is unquantifiable, keeping the community of volunteers placated is an investment in Reddit’s longterm health. Same reason the Mafia bought turkeys for uninvolved neighborhood families on Thanksgiving - so they’d look the other way when shady happenings go down.

But Reddit doesn’t want to spend money on turkeys. So we’ll see how well that works out for them. I’m not optimistic.

Apollo is an app that exists to give a great user experience for reddit.

The official app exists to ensure you get advertising and allow reddit to extract as much personal data from you as possible

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They bought alien blue awhile ago and butchered it. New Reddit is horrible. Even on old reddit the sidebar is in the way (an extension can hide it). They’re just not good at this. (And maintaining two apps is more cost than one.)

I think it’s a move to monetize but without any mindful strategy whatever to utilize the strength of the platform or to maintain the integrity thereof. In other words “Elon did it so we do it too” .

Cheaper to nuke them, I guess.

Spez is running a kingdom and sometimes the king goes mad and does dumb shit to establish authority. This episode felt like that, especially with how they talked down to the dev about it being unoptimised or some crap.